This morning I’m doing something a little bit different. I am actually recording my daily blog for the 40/40 Challenge. And today’s reading comes from Acts 7:30 -53. And in those verses, Stephen is still talking about the ancestors, the Israelite Jewish ancestors and what they did and didn’t do.
He’s kind of giving an overview of their entire history. And one of the things he’s talking about in it is how when Moses was up on the mountain getting the Ten Commandments, that the Israelites got impatient down on the lower part of the mountain. And they had Caleb create… They said, you know, you make some gods for us. Let’s create a golden calf and we can worship the golden calf instead.
Well, as I’ve been doing with these 40/40 challenges, I have been asking Jesus to either show me a Scripture verse that sticks out in the reading or a theme or a pattern that repeats in Scripture. As I was reading and thinking, I was like, you know what, we’re going with another theme I think today, instead of a specific verse.
And the specific theme is about Caleb and the Israelites and how they made the golden calf to worship while Moses was away or because Moses was taking too long. They started asking themselves, Where was Moses? Was he coming back? You know, they started having all these doubts and not wanting to waiting on the Lord and Moses.
And it reminded me of in Genesis 11 when the people decided they were going to build the Tower of Babel so that they could make a name for themselves and so they would have something big to worship. And I thought of the theme of how we love to create idols in our lives, right? It kind of seems like our default that we just default to creating idols out of things besides the Lord, who should be our only God.
We create all these little idols. Lowercase idols that replace Him, like the golden calf and the Tower of Babel. Maybe for some of us it’s addictions or it’s a relationship besides our relationship with Jesus. Maybe it’s a bad habit we do, that’s become an idol. Like for me, sometimes buying art supplies and art classes becomes an idol. That’s all I spend all my time doing looking for classes and stuff. And I have so many classes. I could never watch them all in probably in the next 20 years, but I just, it’s like, I can’t live without them.
That’s kind of the attitude that Israelites had, they had to worship something. They had to, there had to be something, that they could worship, that was tangible, that they could see, that they could worship. The same with Genesis 11 with the Tower of Babel. They wanted something they could see that would go all the way up to heaven.
And so that made me think maybe I need to take an inventory of my life right now to see what little idols I’ve been making. What am I building? Because maybe God’s taking too long to answer something. What am I creating to take His place? What am I creating to fix the issue instead of waiting on Him?
So that was the theme I went with today. To do a self inventory of what and where am I creating something because I feel like God’s taking too long or He’s not answering the way I want Him to answer.
Just something to think about for today as I was reading acts 7:30 – 53.
Until next time with Jesus’ help let’s be less messy and choose what’s better.